1: The Science of Growing Smarter

you did? I cover the main basis mother, mother, Yeah, and teacher. I have taught also, so you've really cover a lot of topics within learning and education. I read a lot of your stuff. I read your brilliant blog almost religiously. It's really good. It's good for my attention span as well, because you keep it pithy and short. You know. Oh, I thought you were going to say it's good for my attention span because it so long. I have a reader who writes me after every newsletter

to say that it's too long. Oh, that's ridiculous. Tell them to go in academia, right right. If they think that's too all my stuff will seem short. Oh my gosh. Compared to journal articles and stuff, and then you have the appropriate links if you want to venture forward. But I find it a really good go to resource for Paron's teachers, educators, everyone. I wanted to ask you, is there some sort of main mission you have or some unifying theme that you think ties together all these various

topics you talk about. Yes, I mean, if you're talking about the span of my whole career, and I've written books that are about One book was cultural history and scientific critique of personality, testing that, as you know, called The Culture Personality, and another one was about the science of prenatal influences called Origin, and then now I'm working on this book called Brilliant, the Science of How We

Get Smarter. And I would say the thing that links twenty years of writing is really this question that is endlessly fascinating to me, which is what makes us the way we are? And I've found the usual answers to that question kind of unsatisfying. I mean, usually we hear about nature, nurture, genes, environment, and each of my books has been an exploration of another kind of answer, you know.

The first one, obviously was looking at personality and the inadequacies of personality tests to capture who we are, and some other ways that we might think about defining who we are, like telling stories about ourselves, for example. And the second book, Origins, was about these really consequential nine months between the moment when our genetic inheritance is put into place a conception, and then when we come into the world. And that's when we think of nurture as beginning.

But of course it starts happening earlier than that, much earlier than that in the womb. So now my current book, I'm very unsatisfied with the idea that intelligence, which I know is a lasting interest of yours, that intelligence is this sort of innate, unchanging characteristic that is either their product of genes or perhaps of childhood how we have

as children. I'm really interested in situational influences on intelligence and how the environments in which we learn and work really profoundly affect how intelligently we can think and act in that moment. And so that's everything I write these days about learning about intelligence, about education in the workplace is animated by that frame, that perspective. That's great. I want to ask you a question, you know, within the

field of my field of psychology. It seems like social psychology seems to be one of your biggest interests and how that relates to our changing nature of who we are and who we believe ourselves to be. I would like to talk a little bit about this nature nurture controversy. Obviously it's both, but what extent do you think there is, Like even going back to your book about I really liked your book and personality and Personality, just think just how the loads some of the predictions are and what

it really says about who we are. I mean, do you think that there is a self that is stable to some degree? Just how influenced by the environment is our personality? Do you think it's much more influenced than we give the credit for in society generally. Yeah, I think it's much more influenced by situational factors than we normally think it to be. It's easier cognitively, and it's

more satisfying emotionally. I think to think of ourselves as very stable and unchanging, and to think of other people in our lives as stable and unchanging. But if just really a moment's reflection, we'll show you that it's really a fiction. I mean, I think one of the appeals of traveling, for example, is that you get to put yourself in a completely different situation and feel the thrill of almost being a different person. But then we when we go home, you know, we're back to our old selves.

But really, if you've ever had the experience, and I can't imagine anyone who hasn't of you know, being at a party, for example, and talking to one person and feeling like you're you're just on, you're smart, you're witty, you're you know, all your jokes are just going over or going over just right. I've never experienced that. Come on, God, I've seen you. And then you turn to another person and it's like you feel kind of dumb, you know, dumb and dull witted. Maybe you've never felt this way,

but I oh, in my wholely childhood time. And what's different. You're the same person, but relationship between you and that other person is different, and it's evoking something different from you. You know, I personally experienced that. I think a lot of people will really resonate with that. You know, let's jump right into standardized test, you know, it's like dump, jump right into it. I feel like a lot of people in that sort of testing mode, their mind changes,

increase their anxiety. Perhaps, would you say they're not at their best cognitively under such a Yeah, yeah, we know that from all the research on stereotype threat that the testing situation is just that it's a very specific situation. And although you know each time you take a test it's in some sense a new situation, the circumstances of the testing situation are kept very uniform purposely so that

the results will be consistent. But it also means that some people, a large number of people consistently underperform when they take standardized tests because of the situation that they're in. It's a recurring situation, and so that's why the work of you know, people like Josh Aronson and Claude Steele

and Gregory Walden and Jeffrey Cohen is so important. Looking at Carol dwac Yeah, looking at the testing situation as a situation and thinking about how we can modify that situation, like, for example, giving students a values affirmation right before they take in a test like that, or having them engage in a ten minute writing exercise where they sort of download all those anxieties, and so those anxieties don't use

up cognitive resources while they're taking the test. So those kinds of interventions are so interesting to me because it's not saying you have to change something fundamental, either about you know, an entire school or workplace, or really anything about yourself. It's more releasing something that's already there. I like that unleasing. Yeah, maybe there's some things we don't want to unleash in students though, And let's segue into that because you've also written on the value of discipline

as well. Right, maybe we don't need to unleash everything all the time. Maybe there's a value to actually self control you have written about as well. Did you want to speak about that at all? Self control interesting? Do you mean like regulatory strategies like trolling one's attention or metacognitive kind of strategies or impulse control all those things. Well, you know, you've argued that there can be great value in studying things that you don't like to study. That's

what I'm referring to. Huh huh, things that might not be fun. Yes, learning is not always fun. That's definitely no, no no, no, no, that just could go in so many different directions. The one thing that immediately occurs to me, because it's research that I've been reading about and I really find interesting, is research led by David Yeager at University of Texas and Angela Duckworth is your colleague is

involved with this, is right. Yeah, So the idea that you know, in learning, in education, there are going to be times when the learning is when the tasks are boring, they're repetitive, or they're not just not a lot of fun, but you really do have to engage in them to create a solid foundation. I mean, I think of something like learning your multiplication tables, or learning how to spell certain words, things that are not creative or fun but

aren't necessary. And so what Yaeger and Duckworth and the others have looked into is whether having a beyond the self purpose for learning can allow us to regulate our impulses. In this case, our impulse would be to like just stop doing this really boring thing, but to keep at it, to be persistent, to have that kind of grit that

keeps you going forward. And in fact, it is the case that when you have a beyond the self purpose, a purpose that transcends you, maybe it's because you want to use your education to give back to your community, or ultimately you want to become a doctor and you want to help people. That kind of thing can help us discipline our unruly impulses and keep us on track. Yeah, and then how do you reconcile that? And this is something I've been trying to do my own research. I

agree that that's so important. But then there's this other set of variables that I know both of us are deeply interested in things like curiosity, interest, motivation, engagement. Yeah, so it seems like too much. It's like a pendulum, maybe too much of the pure grit without those other variables, it just sold. It seems like duty, right, But it seems like if you can combine all these things, then you get like the best outcomes. Would you agree? I do?

I do? And that's why you know something I see, especially in my work on educational technology. I write a column about a lot of helping for the Heckanja Report, and it also runs in Slate. You know, some of the more over enthusiastic proponents of educational technology will suggest that we don't really need teachers anymore because we have

computers that can do everything. And I think that finding that balance, especially when we're novice learners, is one reason why teachers are so important because they might be the ones who can help students say, Okay, go explore this, exercise your creativity, find out what's interesting about this, and then come back and we can work together on building the skills that you need to push that curiosity and

that interest one step further. You know, it can be hard to know how to do that on our own, although that's part of learning. How to learn is learning how to manage your own processes of learning, figuring out what you still need to learn, buckling down to do that maybe hard or boring work, and then going out and exploring again. But in the early stages, I think a teacher can be so important in helping a student find that balance. Yeah, and you've also been though it

can backfire if it's it feels like it's pressured too much. Right, you said, there's great value in having this student discover

on their own that it's relevant exactly. Now. That's research that I absolutely love by Chris Fullman and Judo Thrakovich that says that if you tell students you know, this is important because you're going to need this someday, which was a message that we've all heard at one time or another from a teacher or a parent that often backfires, especially among students who aren't doing very well or don't have a lot of confidence, because basically what you're telling

them is you're going to need this, and they interpret that as and I'm no good at this, so I'm you know, I'm really screwed. Yeah, but yeah, if a lot of this stuff does. And that's why I think it's so important, as I'm sure you agree that, to look at the research and not go on what our intuitions lead us to do, because so often our intuitions

will steer us wrong. But back to that research, if you encourage students to make their own connections and say, how do you think this will be valuable or useful to you in the future, then that is much more motivating to students sort of have them figure that out or write and maybe reflect or write about it on their own. Yeah. My friend who's a delightful teacher, her

name's Lara Jean linked in Florida. She has developed these what she calls the Sensitivity Sketch books, where there are these personal journals that all the students in the classroom have and she gives them time to be sensitive to their own internal state and their own internal life and now connects to the material and they can all write in these sketch books and they're kind of like journals, and she says, the kids love them. Yeah, yeah, that's

such a great idea. I'm sure over time that helps them become more aware of what they're feeling, because we're not usually encouraged to tune into that at school. That's exactly right. Yeah, she said that, like one of like the big beefy like football players or whatever, said was like, why I want more of the sensitivity sketchbooks. She found that hilarious. Maybe he didn't say that in front of

his peers, but that's awesome. Yeah. So there are so many different topics that you cover and maybe at the end of this we can like have a grand unified theory pal connects. But if we don't, that's okay, too computational thinking. Uh huh, why is it important? Uh huh? So this is you're drawing this from McCollum I recently wrote for Slate, which was about the very counterintuitive idea

of teaching computer science without using a computer. And the idea there is that computational thinking is something separate from a computer, the principles on which computers and databases operate, and that's information that all of us, living in a computer filled world should have. The program I was writing

about is called Computer Science Unplugged. That's what the I love that, yeah, that the founders of Computer Science Unplugged believe and I have come to believe that as well, that it's not just computer science majors who need to know how computers work, the principles on which computers work, it's all of us. I mean, we all use computers

on the continuously throughout our day. So Computer Science Unplugged is come up with a lot of these really fun, engaging often like very active and social physically active and social exercises, which is not usually something you associate with computer science, but that can be used even by children as young as kindergarten and elementary school students all the way up through high school and college that they can

use to learn about the principles of computational thinking. And I just thought it was such a cool idea that you could be introducing kids to this fundamental way of interacting with the world really early and earlier probably than they would be able to do anything on the computer.

I mean, that was the initial idea behind Computer Science Unplugged, that you had to have a certain level of proficiency in programming before you could get to some of the cool ideas behind computational thinking the way it was traditionally taught. So they found an alternative way of teaching that allowed students to get into those school ideas before they could ever have hoped to be programming. That's really cool. And one of my degrees was in human computer interaction, and

I didn't haven't done anything with it. Yeah, I mean, like the human interaction thing, I haven't really done anything with it, maybe subconsciously like that kind of competational thinking has helped me, Yeah, in being a more smart individual. Do you think that you can be smarter even if you're a Q score never budgets your whole life? Absolutely? I mean, to me, smart means dealing effectively with the real world. So I really love the phrase by Edwin

Hutchin's Cognition in the Wild. It was the title of his study of how thinking works in the real world, and he actually studied people on who were on like a navy battleship, and how in that real world setting, each individual was a part of this almost hive mind that was kind of running this ship. And he was interested in there was a kind of collective intelligence among

the people running this ship. And so I think for so long we have looked at cognition and captivity, you know, basically like cutting and as it happens on a paper and pencil test in a room under a ticking clock, you know, And I just think that's limbs some usefulness. It does, you know, predict some outcomes, but it's not by any means the whole story. And so I'm not

really interested in IQ tests or IQ scores. I'm interested in how intelligently and effectively someone is able to advance their own goals, which is actually a lot like your definition I think of personal and intelligence. Yeah, you have to really bring personal goals into the mix, right, So I wear a couple of hats. One is as a personality psychologist and individual differences researcher. I do think there

are relatively stable traits across real life span. Will Fleeson has done some really cool research on personality showing that self reports of the Big five personality heroticism, extra version,

conscious is agreeable to open experience. Those self reports are moderately correlated in the real world, in the wild with the app behavior that you have, and in this great situational versus dispositional debate that like Walter Michelle and Seymour Epstein had and like the seventies, has tended to be reconciled that there are definitely situational influences, but when you aggregate it all together, there's something that it means to be me or you on these dimensions, and then also

on IQ. Something that I've been trying to do is reconcile that research with a lot of the great things you're saying, which are true. We don't have to equate intelligence with cognitive ability testing scores, cognitive testability. We don't have to. Most IQ researchers do, right, They equate intelligence with that kind of skill set required to do all night you tess, and I guess if you break out of that paradigm, then it does open up a whole world.

You know, when, at least in terms of personality, these things are moderately correlated, so it's not like personality is completely in the wild or like right, And I don't think you would say with that, No, I always want to emphasize that I'm not saying that there are no stable characteristics relatively stable. Yeah, but then maybe we haven't paid enough attention to those things that are situationally inflected.

And because there's such a dominant sense among many scientists and among the public the general public that personality intelligence are fixed and innate and not subject to situational factors, I just want to be calling attention to this other piece that we have not been paying enough attention to in the past. Yeah, it's a great thing that you're doing, that you're bringing attention to that, it's it's much needed. IQ researchers will strip all context away because they don't

want any prior influences. They think that's what pure intelligence is or raw intelligence is. As much as we strip, but of course you can't strip. You can never And I think they would realize that, you know, even as much as they the ideal would be to completely you know, all these things are you know, my advisor, Robert Sterenberg, I studied how these things are very culturally based as well. Yeah,

but we have a tendency. I think once we've created an entity like IQ, then we start treating it like it's really yet. Yeah, we start reifying it. Yeah, And I think it's very easy to fall into that trap. I agree absolutely. I think like people like you are in the minority though, and me as well, and we're completely satisfied not equating intelligence with general cognitive ability, which is what I keep test makers tend to equate it.

You know, there's a long history and education of equating the two because of some of the most you know, like worst urnmin and his advocacy of gifted talented education in the fifties and sixties made the argument that that's the only line where you're going to find the geniuses, right, And he made an argument so it became grounded in education and is such a strong part of education that not many people are challenging it because it's been there

for first fifty years, that sort of idea. Yeah. I remember having a conversation with Gregory Walden and he was great, wel Yeah, Stanford, who is one of my favorite thinkers on this, and I remember him saying it's really all term and spault. I would agree with that. To some degree. Yeah, yeah,

very strong beliefs. And it's interesting. You know, he did this long and chunal study where he followed up these high i Q kids selected based just in their IQ, and he found that at the end of the day, like he admitted it, that the i Q was not the most important variable. It was predicting. It was personality traits, not these non cognitive traits like perseverance and motivation and stuff.

You know what, Angela Duckworth is giving us empirical evidence for right and but angel Duckworth is studying it as a tree as you measure this and it's reliable and valid and something that she is trying to study, but we don't have conclusive answers yet. Is that can grit be improved? Yeah? What's much confident that it can be? Well again, I would say, let's think about the environments in which people are working and learning. Are they supportive

of expressing grit or carrying through with perseverance? And I'm reading a book right now that's coming out soon by personality psychologists Brian Little called Me, Myself and Us I Think, and he talks about how there are relatively stable personality traits, but that people's I think he calls them personal projects. People's passions basically can bring out all kinds of new

dimensions of personality that no one had seen before. Like you can imagine an introverted, rather timid person who has some kind of cause that is really meaningful to her, and she becomes able to testify in front of congress or speak in front of hundreds of people. You know. So I think I would always want to keep in mind the situational influences, like is someone in the grip of a personal passion and if so, that can change what it means to have a kind of subtled personality. Yeah.

I really like that phrase, grip of personal passion. Yeah, yeah, really cool. Yeah did you just come up with that on the spot. No, Well, she might have said passion, but he calls them personal projects, I think. Yeah, so the passion element, you know, there's different kinds of passion. There's like a harmonious and obsessive. Actually, what do you think is the difference between passionate and interest? Well, I think it would probably be a matter of degree of

affect that you bring to it. I guess maybe passion has a more affective component, Like you bring all kinds of emotion to it, and interest is more purely like cerebral. But also I think of passion as something that's stronger than an interest. You could have a passionate interest, cool, passionate interests, that's cool. Yeah, you can have a non passionate interest as well. Yeah, sure, you could have a passing interest in something so common core good or bad.

It's all about the implementation. I actually think the ideas behind it are solid and supported by research. I'm a big fan of Ed Hirsch and his ideas about the importance of background knowledge to comprehension. And again, that's kind of another situation, and in this case an internal situation that makes us more intelligent. When we have knowledge and it's deep and it's interconnected and it's transferable knowledge, our

minds just work better, you know, we're smarter. That's it's a domain specific kind of phenomenon where we're able to make better judgments or perform tasks more effectively in areas where we know stuff than where we don't. And that's another thing that I sometimes see people in the educational technology world saying that kids don't really need to learn facts anymore because you can always just google it. Well, actually, facts have to be jored in here for all those

cognitive processes to work. I've seen you hold up a sign of a one sentence op ed which relates to this. Do you want to say what there was? Well, you've been google stalking Me's like, I like can quote it for there better than I can do. It was something like we need knowledge and not just skills. Am I right? I don't know. I don't mean, I'm not like that much of a stalker right now, knowledge and not just skills.

You know, you hear a lot of these days about twenty first century education, and you know that it's become kind of a buzz and meaningless buzzword. But too often when people talk about twenty first century education, they're talking about skills and knowledge is left out. But knowledge is just as important or more important than it was in the era before Google. That's cool, Yeah, I really like that.

You know, like IQ tests and our measures of intelligence we call intelligence tests try to strip as much knowledge away, but maybe we should allow students to gather as much knowledge as possible and give them a chance to like synthesize it or reflect on it. As opposed to just regurgitate it. Well, yeah, have you heard about the theories of Kieran Egan, where this deep learning where students might study one subject for like years, like apples or dust

or like was a big advocate of that. Yeah, I mean, I think there is something to that that becoming an expert in one domain helps you understand something about the nature of expertise in general. And I think lots of

kids are making themselves into experts on their own. You know, my older son is an eight year old expert in American history and in baseball, and you know, lots of kids become experts in dinosaurs or you know, things that interest them, and that's an incredibly motivating force when you have, again a personal passion of personal interest and then you become an expert almost in the course of pursuing your passion. I think we could do a lot more of encouraging

students to do that. Yeah, Annie, you study a lot about what are good ways to learn and what are not? Do you mind telling the audience will some optimal things that've come across in your research the optimal ways of learning? Mm? Hm, Well, you know again, I'm always looking at how the environments in which we learn are the word I'd like to use, evoke our intelligence or suppress our intelligence. And unfortunately, I think a lot of learning environments schools around the country

are suppressing kids intelligence rather than evoking it. But one example of an evocative environment would be one in which kids feel they belong. And I think we often don't recognize how important the social element of learning is and how important it is feel for students to feel part of a community, a community of learners, of stocking, belonging. Yeah,

especially in middle school. The evidence is pretty clear that many, many students do not feel that they belong in school and that you can just see their academic performance dropping because they don't really feel like they have a place there that they're accepted for who they are. And there's a lot of changes we could make to middle school to make sure that that sense of belonging states as well as academia. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of women in South Yeah, that's a very good point.

That's a very good point. Yeah, Yeah, it's so important. I really like that you raise attention to that, what are there good not just like situational factors, but things that the person can do active learning strategies something to be a better learner. What what are some good strategies are you thinking more of, like the cognitive strategies of like how to memorize things? And you know, I'll ask

you because you're next. You're the next. Thing I was going to mention might not be quite what you have in mind, but you you have nothing in mind any I'm like, I'm trying to get your wisdom right right, So I was going to mention Carol else work on the gross mindset. I'm really impressed with how important it is to mindsets. Yeah, to believe that intelligence can be expanded through one's hard work and effort. And how you know, the fixed mindset which a lot of people have. You know,

I'm this, I'm this smart and no smarter. Nothing I do is going to change that. That's really confirmed every day for a lot of students who get that message from the teachers and other adults around them. So that would be something that can be changed. Carol Dwreck has shown that the gross mindset can be cultivated, so that would be another important piece. I would think of an evocative learning and environment. What about like like highlighting or

like underwining teaching yourself going to the office hours. Which ones should students do? Yeah, well, throw out the highlighter, step away. Oh yeah, okay, I'll throw that in my whole book. No, I mean the problem is that students use highlighting and rereading. They rely way too heavily on those strategies. Those are some of the most popular strategies

for studying, and they are the least effective. So really, what students should be doing is not rereading that textbook for the tenth time, which gives you this illusion of fluency, that this illusion of knowledge that you know it, but as soon as the test is in front of you, it's like poof, it's gone. What students should do is close that textbook and engage in what is known as

retrieval practice, which is basically testing yourself. And in this one regard, an old fashioned technique is really still really useful. That's flashcards, because that's effectively, you know, retrieval practice, high the answer from yourself and practicing pulling that up from your memory. Because we think of testing as a way to measure what you know, but testing, engaging in the practice of testing self testing actually changes what you know.

So every time you bring it up out of your memory. You're strengthening that connection. So retrieval practice and then space repetition, which is something that we've known about for so long. Psychnology is known about for so long, and still we don't do it, you know, And that's not cramming the night before test, but revisiting the material at spaced out intervals throughout the space out all the time. Annie, I'm really good at that. I'm good at space talk about

daydreaming and the importance of day dreaming. But I would just add one more technique. And it's funny. I didn't bring these up at first because I feel like people hear these and they're like, yeah, yeah, like another study tip. But these things really work. I feel like if maybe if teachers incorporated them more into the way that they teach, in the way that they review for help their students review for exams, or you know, they're being incorporated into

technological tools. So maybe that'll be the thing that brings space repetition and retrieval practice and this other thing I was going to mention interleaving into the mainstream. Even though you know, as I say, we've known about these things

for decades and they've kind of never caught on. But Interleavingah, interleaving is when you know, usually when a kid is completing a homework assignment, they'll get blocks of say, math problems, like here's your addition problems, here's your subtraction problems, here's your multipation problems, and then the student knows exactly which solution strategy they're going to be using even before they

start on the problems. But of course that's not how problems come to us in the real world or on tests. Usually the hardest part about the problem is figuring out what solutions strategy to apply. So it's much more effective to mix up those types of questions, have them in blocks, so that with each question you have to figure out, Okay, what kind of problem is this and what do I

need to do to solve it. So that's something that teachers or even parents or students themselves could implement pretty easily. I think very cool. You've read a lot about learning disabilities, dyslexia in particular, Yeah, you wrote a lot. Why are you so interested in dyslexia out of it is the most prominent, most rates of learning disabilities? How do you get interested in that topic? And well, there is dyslexia

in my family go it. Yeah, that is something that has personally affected me because I've seen people that I love struggle with dyslexia. But also I'm very interested in reading and the mechanics of reading, and so of course when something goes wrong with a process, that can be a window into understanding it more generally. And it's also, interestingly one of the few places where and you might disagree with me about this, it'd be interesting to know

if you agree or disagree with me. But I disagree well because I know you know a lot about the brain, and you write a lot about the brain. But I'm persuaded that at this point there's not a whole lot that neuroscience has to offer in terms of direct prescriptions for what to do in education. And you know that's not a widely shared view. If you look at how much stuff there is out there about brain based learning,

there's a lot of junk out there. There's a lot of junk out there, and so I dyslexia strikes me as one of the areas where research in brain science really has contributed to telling us what to do about it, what to do about the condition of dyslexia, that the neuroscience research that has showed us that it's really an oral problem, a problem of hearing rather than seeing, is a really useful insight which we can use to treat dyslexic people and help them more effectively. But in general,

I don't know, do you see applications for neuroscience. I know that you've argued recently that there's a lot it's a lot more malleable and culturally based dyslexia, and you've reviewed some gray matter research on that. Yes, Well, the idea that really none of us have brains that were wired to read, you know, that's not a program that our brains have evolved to have. So we have to kind of painstakingly rewire our brains one at a time

to learn to read. And the one of the ways that that happens is simply getting a lot of reading practice. But for dyslexics, reading is so difficult that they do less of it and so their brains change less. So it's part of when we're examining a dyslexic child, we're not just seeing that initial deficit, that initial kind of thing that's different about their brain. We're also seeing the result of maybe many years of getting less practice at

reading and thus less change of the brain. I have a question, why do you make the argument that we our brains aren't wired to read, Like, what's the evidence for that that our brains didn't evolve brain mechanisms to support the active reading. Well, reading is just such a recently developed technology. There hasn't been time for our brains to develop a sort of reading specific module. So, you know, there's really interesting books by Stanislaus Dehane, Is that how

you say it? And Marian Wolfe tough about how the brain has to undergo a transformation really to become literate, and fascinating experiments looking at Colombian gorillas, for example, who literally grew up fighting and so never learned to read, but then became literate as adults, and the changes that their brains underwent as they became literate. Because often when people don't become literate, it's not an unselected population. There's

some reason that they didn't learn to read. But in this case, it was just like everybody who grew up in this community was a gorilla fighter rather than a

school child. So it made them a good population to look at, right, So we could say that, like neurologically speaking, that people who have difficulty reading or have difficulty with language more generally because reading just plays on our evolved mechanisms for language, but predominant in the left hemisphere Brokers area, Bernicke's area, that people who have difficulty with this do have some sort of different kind of structural wiring or so.

But of course that structural wiring is influenced by experience, is experience dependent as well as influenced by genes. They're both in interaction. So you could use neuroscience as a guide to what specific kind of language functions are impaired or need remediation. See neuroscience could make the case that that's true. But I agree that we should be very hesitant about and be worried about just how much and not get too a we're excited that we really know

that much about how to apply it. So I'm totally with you on that, right, right, I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, yeah, sure, let's talk about robo graders. Oh yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

You know, anything we can do to make kids more interested in learning, more willing and motivated to keep persevering, and it seems like robo graders might be an answer to that, right, right, And to give your listeners background on why it would be that robo graders might have that effect, because of course, when most people can hear the term robo readers or robograders, yeah, the idea of subjecting a piece of you know, because when I'm talking

about robo readers or robo graders, we're not I'm not just talking about scoring a bubble test. There are software programs now that claim to be able to assess and evaluate pieces of writing, you know, And so there's been a huge pushback from you know, faculty who teach writing, for example, who say there's no way that a computer, that a machine can evaluate the quality of a piece of writing. And I generally agree with that. I don't

think they're ready for prime time in that regard. But I did find very interesting some studies that suggested that feedback from an automated program on students writing on pretty basic stuff like you know, send structure or punctuation or the way that a piece was organized, that students responded very differently to that kind of feedback from a machine than similar than to similar feedback from a person and in this case, it was the very non humanness of

the robograder that made it a better tool for learning. You know, usually we think that the human element is the most important thing in education, and it usually is, but in this case, it was the fact that it wasn't a person saying you did this wrong that made the feedback seem less threatening to the student, and so they were more willing to robot to repeatedly revise, and

they actually ultimately wrote better papers because of this. Well, I wonder, like if you did a study where you just specifically isolate good teachers versus robo graders, versus all

teachers versus robo graders. I wonder how we can apply these principles to Like I wonder if it's not really the human versus robot dimension, but it's the non judgmental mentioned What if we actually had I was thinking when I was reading your article, what if we meet everything more revisable and this growth back to this growth mindset culture where students know that on every assessment and everything, they're not being judged, it's just feedback that they can revise.

Is there a lessons we can learn from robots? Yeah? Yeah, right, I like that a lot. I like that a lot. I Also it makes me think of, you know again Greg Walden's idea of whise interventions wise, you know, because negative feedback can be experienced is very alienating, like you don't belong here, You're not a part of this community, You're not good enough. And so a wise feedback says, basically,

I have high expectations. I know you can meet them, and that's why I'm giving you this feedback and even just a little post it note, you know, put on top of a regularly grated assignment that says I have high expectations, I know you can meet them. That's why I'm telling you this has amazingly you know, positive effects on students willingness to revise and to react to that feedback. So I think that's like a really cool way to go forward to. I love it. Thank you so much

for this interview. Any I have very high expectations for your new book. You know I can keep them right, Yes? Absolutely. Would you like to end with any sort of lasting advice for parents, educators, or individuals who want to learn and become smarter. Yes, pay attention to the environment in which the immediate conditions in which you're learning, and make

sure that they're evoking intelligence and not suppressing it. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as a formative and thought proboling if I did. If you don't like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com. Oh you